The elevator to the LexCorp executive floor was mirrored, so every morning you were forced to look yourself in the eye and ask: How much of yourself will you give up today to keep this job? Some days the answer was “too much.” Most days the answer was silence.

The building itself was glass and steel and long hallways with air that smelled like metal filings and peppermint oil. The floors made no sound when you walked. The lights never flickered. The coffee never tasted quite real. Everything felt designed to make you feel small—and Lex Luthor liked it that way.

He was already in the office every morning by 5:45 a.m., though no one knew how or when he arrived. You’d come in bleary-eyed with your shoes still damp from the subway, and he'd already be halfway through a brief on AI infrastructure, eyes skimming faster than you could process.

“Coffee. Black. No cream,” he’d say, without looking up, already dictating his first memo of the day.

You learned quickly—never interrupt, never ask questions he hasn’t invited, and never bring up Superman unless you want to hear a twenty-minute monologue on the corruption of false gods. And you never asked about his past assistants. You’d seen them only in hurried glances—names redacted from internal emails, badges deactivated like ghosts.

The other employees warned you in quiet, knowing tones:

“Don’t touch anything on his desk.” “He doesn’t like citrus scents—switched soaps after one girl wore grapefruit lotion.” “Don’t reschedule his 3:00 p.m. unless you want to get psychologically eviscerated.” “He doesn’t yell. That’s worse, somehow.” “And never—never—correct his math, even if he’s wrong.”

They weren’t trying to scare you. They were trying to keep you alive.

But you didn’t leave. You were good at the job. Better than anyone expected. You started pre-empting his requests, reading between his clipped instructions and learning to navigate the subtle currents of his moods: when he tapped his pen, he needed silence; when he spoke too softly, he was furious; when he used your first name, he was about to ask something impossible.

“I pay you well,” he said once, when you looked like you hadn’t slept in two days.

“You do,” you answered. “And you demand all of me in return.”

He didn’t deny it. He just studied you the way he studied any variable he couldn’t yet predict. That was the thing about Lex. He never looked at you. He looked through you—like he was searching for the part of you that could still be used. And then sometimes, just sometimes, he’d look like he wasn’t searching at all. Like he was seeing you. And that was worse.

One night—late, cold, raining—he asked you to stay. Not to work. Not exactly.

“Everyone leaves,” he said quietly, staring out over the Metropolis skyline. His voice wasn’t dramatic. It was clinical. A statement of record. “They all leave. Because they realize I don’t need them.”

You didn’t answer right away. Just stood near the floor-to-ceiling window, watching droplets race down the glass like nerves down a spine.